Remember times when there were no launcher? Just double click and you're running the game. Good times indeed.
Steam was considered an abomination when it was released. Drm and a launcher to run HL2? GTFO.
Yet here we are where everyone loves Steam. Its no surprise other companies wanted to follow knowing that in 20 years, a horrible consumer policy could become beloved.
When it was released? Steam ran like shit for me until probably 2017. It's finally a usable piece of software.
I also prefer steam because steam comes with a lot of benefits. If steam was still just a launcher and nothing more, I think most people would take issue with it today. That's just not the case, though.
Easy way to manage games, huge sales, support forums, easy way to manage friends, steam workshop, support for pretty much every controller, fast download servers
And one thing that people probably don't realize, is that steam will work with developers to implement patches. Many times when I play old games I'll go to PC gaming wiki and see that I need a few patches and mods to make the game work, but the wiki will say that those patches and mods were implemented into the steam release. It's really nice.
Do you even use steam? There is reason why its so loved. Everything else they bring is good enough price for me for steam being a launcher and drm.
Only problem I have with steam is worrying what will happen if valve goes bad or disappears in the future. But I hope it has sunk in to them by now that they will get much more money by being customer friendly and nice instead of being pieces of shit like some of the competition. I still hope that gog will become good competitor to steam.
That's why I use Playnite
It still will launch a launcher if it needs to, but at least you can see all of your games in one place
Which is absolutely a must if you have a huge library across multiple platforms. How else will I find out if that indie gem in the latest Humble Bundle is already in the library somewhere?
Joking aside, Playnite is especially awesome if you like admiring a collection in gallery view. The "sorting title" feature is exactly what we need in a day and age where publishers don't give a fuck about proper naming schemes.
They be like:
I just want my collection displayed in the proper order, stop that shit!
Playnite is sick. I’ve spent a ton of hours writing my own themes to customize it and set up categories for all of my games. And by that point I don’t even want to play the game I opened it for anymore lol
Heroic is pretty good too. Supports a lot fewer stores than Playnite (only Epic, GOG, and Amazon at the moment), but it doesn't require any of the original launcher to be installed in order to download and play any games (with a few exceptions, such the the Star Wars games on Epic which still require the original launcher due to some fuckery).
Works on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and on the latter two, will even help you set up and configure Wine automatically in order to run your Windows games.
I made an Epic account years ago for the freebies. I'm not sure, but I'd bet I never played a single one.
If you claimed all of them you've got some seriously great games in there... Control, Subnautica, Alien Isolation, all the Tomb Raider games, Evil Within...
The entire BioShock collection, Rogue Legacy, Pathfinder Kingmaker, XCOM 2, Yooka-Laylee and Y-L and the Impossible Lair, Several Warhammer games, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep, Star Wars Squadrons, Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead, Fallout 1, 2, 3, NV, and Tactics, Guacamelee and Guacamelee 2, Homeworld 1&2 Remastered, KSP, and of course LAWN MOWING SIMULATOR!!!
Edit: I almost forgot PC Building Simulator with the IT Expansion!
Same. I even played some of them. Still never gave them a red cent because their launcher is an offense to all mankind.
Dont buy games from AAA publishers and you mostly have steam or GOG.
Better yet. Buy them from Itch.io directly, since indies are better anyway.
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laughs in multiMC
Nah get on Prism
The curseforge launcher is the worst launcher I've ever used. Best launcher imo is PolyMC, it's a fork of MultiMC that adds a bunch of really nice features like being able to download mods directly from the launcher.
This is a rare console W over PC. All your games are just there. No additional launchers or log ins, no waiting 30 minutes for the game to update because you havnt opened that launcher in months.
Yeah but then you have to use a controller like a chump.
They're capable of supporting mouse and keyboard. For some reason most games just don't. Like on my PS5, anything that uses a mouse style menu, I can use a mouse to operate. I can also use a keyboard to type in input boxes with anything. But the only game I can fully play with a M&KB I've tried so far is Call of Duty. Which is nuts because Stellaris, Civilization and City Skylines are on this system, too, and they would very much benefit from full M&KB support.
Games do update when you haven’t played them for a while. At least on Switch.
I don't even like steam
Absolutely hated it when I was forced to use it. Nowadays I don't mind that much anymore. But if a game needs to launch another launcher first, that drives me crazy.
Looking at you, EA and Ubishit.
I got into steam because I could (using modded files) download valve games for free. It was like piracy but without the torrenting and gameboxart.jpg.exe shenanigans.
Then I liked Counter Strike, and portal was coming out... and now I have a few thousand bucks in games.
Still don't like having to run a nanny program to be "allowed" to play the shit I paid for. But steam is the best of that garbage pile.
I use dedicated cpu cores and other tweaks on my setup to reduce game input latency. Steam is always the 1 fucking program that randomly starves my remaining cores for absolutely no reason
thank you for the reminder to fetch my freebie for the week from epic. not that i actually play them (have a whole one title installed). i just collect those, too.
Now how about we get an Office launcher
Achievement unlocked: Starting to Excel
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So called free market socialists when steam offers almost all the games in one launcher (monopoly)
at least they're using the money they get to make hardware that would not get greenlit otherwise due to too high market risks
and they didn't suddenly make the platform subscription only & put all the new features in the cloud to make it harder to pirate (looking at you Adobe you pos)
monopoly
No, you need uplay for that
The clear solution is a single centralized launcher for all these launchers.
I will say that I'll take the lesser evil of having an unintrusive launcher for a game that pops up after I select play in Steam (Creative Assembly, Larian, etc.) which can then be closed after the game starts than go back to when everyone wanted you to install a bloated distribution platform to play their specific game (Looking at you Stardock, Uplay, etc.).
But in the shadows of Playnite, one more launcher was made.
One launcher to bind them.
Reason number 217 why pirated games are better.
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